Critical Distance PROGRAMMING New Directions for Critical Distance

In 2023, we embarked upon a yearlong research and community consultation process under the banner of New Directions for Critical Distance. Still reeling from pandemic-related setbacks, we had identified strategic and financial planning as key to our recovery. Thanks to the Government of Canada’s Community Services Recovery Fund, we were able to design an integrated, multi-phase process that began in consultation with key mentors, curatorial peers, and stakeholders from across the sector.

Through an in-depth survey developed in collaboration with senior market analyst and consultant Marina Mandić, plus over 40 hours of face-to-face community consultations between CDCC Director Shani Khoo Parsons and emerging, midcareer, and established curators from across Canada, we engaged a representative sampling of ~150 curatorial colleagues in conversation and critical questions on the impact of CDCC’s past programs, the context of our current positioning, and a few mutually imagined futures. In the process we were grateful to receive honest feedback and encouraging advice in equal measure, and we remain humbled by the immense generosity of our “first responders” — to what we hope will be a continuing process of collective reflection, recovery, and renewal. (We will return to these conversations in future.)

Building on what we learned through this research, CDCC staff and Board worked with seasoned arts management consultant (and passionate educator) Anne Frost, and our dedicated finance team at Young Associates (Jason Aviss and Ingel Madrus) on strategic/financial planning to carry us through our next three years and beyond. With this robust plan in place, our vision for supporting and advancing critical curatorial inquiry, community, and practice remains as clear and bright-eyed as ever.

We are now in development for some promising new initiatives with an emphasis on sustainable relationship-building between curators, artists, arts organizations, audiences, our sector, and society more broadly. Not coincidentally, such programs are also the most highly requested from among the options we presented to curators as part of our CFC-funded research and recovery project. (Survey results will be published here soon.)